


Marienburg

by katuman



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Brotherhood, Gen, Historical Hetalia, Nostalgia, emotional turmoil and shit, gilbo has feelings he cant put into words yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-06
Updated: 2017-03-06
Packaged: 2018-09-28 16:49:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10139969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katuman/pseuds/katuman
Summary: Prussia visits some old fucking castle and experiences at least two of his five feelings at once.





	

__

* * *

 

_Welcome home Gilbert,_ said no one but him as he handed a fistful of cash to the ticket girl and received an exasperated look in return.

"It's 39,50." she said to him flatly in Polish.

"There's forty in there."

"I see."

_God. Fucking Germans_ , he could hear her screaming internally as she counted. Prussia felt a little bit bad, but not bad enough to have done it himself. She gave him back half and a walkman. "The castle grounds close at seven. The museum is only open until four."

"I'll keep it in mind, thanks," he nodded, and almost left everything on the counter.

Seventy-four years it had taken him to find his way back. More than that, probably; a fucking youth group excursion for the Third Reich's pride and joy didn't quite live up to a homecoming. And now Prussia stood to the left of the gate, hoping that he wouldn't get caught technically trespassing in Poland... again. Lutz didn't need that, and with any luck, the kid would never know he was here.

He had walked through this gate more times than he could remember, but he had never done so unarmed or anonymously, and never on foot. He didn’t even realize he had lowered his head until he emerged on the other side of the shadow with his eyes on the ground and a warm feeling inside of him that the coffee and stale butterkeks couldn’t account for. A couple of tourists muttered: “Excuse me,” to him and kept going.

And when he looked up again, it was April. He was old. There was a Polish flag on the battlements. He readjusted his backpack and desperately wished for a smoke. He wanted to roll in the grassy lawn like a dog. He wanted his brother to know things about him without having to worry. But Lutz wasn’t ready to talk about Marienburg and, in some ways, neither was he.

So he kept walking, along the path of narrow flagstones, brushing the walls.

These old places settled, someone had told him. The weight of the structure on the foundation, or maybe the way dirt liked to swell with the floods. Marienburg looked like she had been humbled: by time, by poor choices, by Soviet troops. He could see the seams in the mortar where they had lain new bricks, and it felt recent. The courtyard was almost unnervingly clean. He had only seen pictures of what it looked like in '45—and God if this wasn't a fucking improvement—but it bothered Prussia, a little, to realize that as soon as he stepped away from the structure, he couldn't really be sure if it had looked like this when he was younger. Only the out-facing walls looked familiar. Still fucking pitted by cannon-shot, from a time when good, solid masonry presented an actual challenge.

He passed by a couple of guys wearing his old uniform. One of them was surreptitiously checking his Blackberry with his chainmail drawn up to his elbow while his buddy lectured a group of schoolchildren in one of the long, narrow halls that encircled the courtyard. Prussia skirted the tourists, caught a handful of words about Grunwald, and slipped into the refectory, out of sight.

Columns like Jerusalem's palm trees.

He caught his breath, closed his eyes and ran a hand along the side of a dining table just to be sure it was real. Real wood. Holy shit; Poland had outdone himself. He sat down. Didn't ask if he could. He laid his forehead flat on the grain of the polished oak and remembered what it had smelled like: shitty dirt bread, and porridge. _Sweet Jesus._ He looked down at the floor beneath his spread legs and half expected to hear a remark on his posture, a smack on the back of the head.

Marienburg wasn't the first or the only home he had ever known. There were others which he only vaguely remembered: the hot, gritty barracks at Acre and the crude palisades on the edge of the Baltic. But here, in Marienburg, they had been safe. All thanks to Siegfried, who had seen the writing on the wall, written in the blood of the Templars, and gotten them the hell out of Venice before they suffered the same. Fresh out of the Holy Land, this fucking place had been greener than Eden. He had kissed the ground. Thrown himself naked into the river when the weather was hot. On one of the benches in the cloister he had slept and dreamt of a mother sitting beside him—maybe his—but probably just the Virgin, crowned in her halo of stars. Life hadn't been easy, and it hadn't been gentle, but it had been _good_.

Prussia opened his eyes again. Most of the tour had dispersed, and his stomach was growling. He stretched, lifted himself off of the bench, and turned off his phone.

\---

The brochure said something about St. Anne's being renovated, and it did look pristine. Even so, Prussia found himself lingering quietly on the steps, in the doorway. It was quiet inside. The narrow windows set in the alcove kept the light dim. He had done penance here when he was a child—and even less modest, somehow—reassured by the knowledge that the old grandmasters buried under the chapel could hear him. No getting back in their good graces at this point.

His eyes followed the path of the tiles. An old psalm came back to him, though he hadn't bothered to say it in centuries.

He ate a pretzel and licked the salt from his fingers, and he thought about von Erlischshausen's old bones in that mausoleum, and whether he'd known that his successor was going to lose _everything_ to a bunch of worthless Tyrolean mercs.

\---

What he didn’t remember was the walk to the high castle being so fucking far. Prussia wasn’t winded exactly by the time he got to the top, but he was certainly... something. Eating had helped—the reminiscing certainly hadn't—and the prospect of an overnight drive with a pack of Marlboros in the passenger seat suddenly seemed very appealing.

He dug his elbows into the stone of the battlements. His heart skipped reflexively at the sight of the model siege engines off in the distance. There were a lot of people below, but he couldn't feel any of them.

He thought about Hungary and her dearly departed Transylvanian range, and of his Königsberg, elsewhere, and he wondered how long it took to stop feeling that too. The old fortress around him deserved no less than a fucking apology from its favorite son for staying away for so long. But well, he had chosen to stay away hadn’t he?

He could have been here in '89 before he'd been leashed and put in his brother’s custody in Berlin. He could have visited _since_ and with minimal drama because Lutz, well, Lutz wasn't a complete piece of shit and he probably would have _let him go_ if he'd asked.

The problem was that Prussia didn't like asking.

The problem was that Germany wouldn't have come.

There had been so many other Marienburgs, so many high castles and all of them haunted by the shadows of men that his brother was only now beginning to face. Germany recoiled from these, the inanimate things. The things that he hadn't grown up with and could not—would never—have any untainted memory of. Lutz didn't know what the air tasted like up here, looking over the Vistula. He had been too young to remember it in all of its 14th-century glory. He didn't understand why it mattered.

But someday he hoped, maybe Lutz would be able to look him in the eye again—all of him—without pity or rue. And maybe then he could bring him here; through the gate, up the paving stones and out through the chapel into the light, and he would be able to finally fucking tell him about it.

_this artwork provided by[historia_vitae_magistras](http://archiveofourown.org/users/historia_vitae_magistras/pseuds/historia_vitae_magistras)_

**Author's Note:**

> Marienburg (today Malbork Castle) was sold in 1456 in lieu of unpaid wages to mercenaries, who then sold it to Poland. After that, the capital of the Teutonic Knights moved to Königsberg. It was there that Prussia either left or was expelled from the Order (choose your own adventure here, kids) and moved into the role we best know him in.


End file.
